As an exercise to improve my knowledge of Rails and test-driven development, I'm currently building a clone of Hacker News. I have a barebones site put together with minimal styling. At the moment, I'm working on the user model while using migrations to gradually improve it. Along the way, I'm writing tests in rspec first and then writing code to make the tests pass. The Rails Tutorial continues to serve as a critical reference as I progress.
For a passing moment, I thought I might need to change a database column. Whereas my user model had an attribute name, I considered updating the model to include a username attribute. Of course, from the method user.username alone, it's self-evident why that's a bad idea. Instead of touching the model and the database, it's better to just change the value within a view. In other words, when a user goes to the signup page, instead of a name field, there will be a username field. The database will simply store that value as name in the user table.
Should the opportunity arise to change a column name in a database, though, Rails provides an easy way to do it. Instead of mucking around in past migrations and potentially breaking things in a messy way, it's possible to simply generate a migration which changes the column's name.
rails generate migration ChangeOldColumnToNewColumn
The body of the migration is equally simple (as explained in a post from stackoverflow):
rename_column :table, :old_column, :new_column
By staying within the migration workflow, it's easy to avoid any messy problems which would almost certainly be introduced by manually editing past code.